A leader of the Orego…
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While the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in OR continues, the media are using any word but the right one when referring to the occupiers.
At a town hall meeting on Wednesday afternoon, residents of the closest town, Burns, appeared divided on whether the militia should leave the refuge, a 45-minute drive away.
“I understand that the occupiers of the federal land have said that they will leave if the local community doesn’t want them, and from what I’m seeing in the news, the local community doesn’t want them”, Clinton said in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun. “By their actions they are desecrating one of our sacred traditional cultural properties”.
An Oregon sheriff met with the leader of a small, armed group that has been occupying a national wildlife refuge for nearly a week and asked them to leave peacefully.
The sheriff of the OR county where armed anti-government activists have occupied federal land asked the protesters to go home Thursday at their first meeting since the confrontation began. The leader of a group of armed protesters occupying the headquarters of a USA wildlife refuge in rural southeastern OR yesterday rejected a sheriff’s offer of passage out of the state to end the standoff. “We will protect ourselves, but that’s not what we want and I don’t think that’s what they want”, said militia member John Ritzheimer to ABC’s Neal Karlinsky at the refuge.
“Nope”, Bundy said. “We’re just here to establish some rights and help you people out”.
“They are waking people up”, said 80-year-old Merlin Rupp, a long-time local resident. “When they came for the loggers, I didn’t say nothing because I wasn’t a logger”, Hanford said.
“He says right now it’s just an issue over a few buildings that are 30 miles out of town”, Bundy said.
“Hopefully some of the ranching families and the community will come and support you guys”, rancher Royce Wilber told them. But in addition to the reckless lawlessness of gunmen seizing a national wildlife refuge, the underlying ideas they claim to be promoting are also unsafe: getting rid of our national public lands would mean that all of us would lose access to the national forests, monuments, and cherished public lands that our proud inheritance.
“I most certainly believe that the federal government controls far too much land in the Western parts of the United States especially”, Rubio told the Des Moines Register’s editorial board. Their father, Cliven Bundy, in 2014 led a standoff with federal agents after a two-decade legal dispute over unpaid grazing fees on federal-owned land in Nevada.
Meanwhile, Oregon Governor Kate Brown released a statement on Thursday decrying the activities of Bundy’s militia and ordering the group to “decamp immediately and be held accountable”. But “we don’t need outsiders to bring public attention”.
US Representative Greg Walden, whose congressional district includes Burns and Malheur, said on Wednesday he had been on the phone to the county judge and local ranchers until late on Tuesday night.
Earlier in the day, before meeting the sheriff, the Bundys had made it known that they would present a set of demands on Friday.
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The group’s grievances include the imprisonment Monday of ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond on federal arson charges after they lit fire on their OR ranch in 2001 that spread to federal land. We need to make sure there is some teeth in these land transfers. They will now serve about four more years each. However, federal prosecutors appealed their sentences and requested that they receive the minimum of five years.
